Anwen Muston @anwenmuston1 & Sophia Botha @sophiabotha74 (UK)

The UK House Of Commons are investigating an incident involving two trans activists who have claimed they were misgendered repeatedly by security staff. Anwen Muston, a Labour transgender officer, and Sophia Botha, a disability officer for LGBT Labour, claim they were called “sir.”

Hi, I know Sophia through her political discussions online and watched a few of her Youtube videos a little while ago, but I don’t know her in person. I noticed she’d posted on Facebook an update a few minutes ago about Gender Identity Watch writing about her in connection with her article in Gay Star so I read the article here on this page and forgive me but I think someone hasn’t understood her issue with Argos. Naturally I can imagine that trans women and men would prefer for people in all sectors of modern life to address them by the title or salutation that they feel suits them, their gender etc and this was an issue for Sophia when she was calling Argos, but the issue goes deeper than just misgendering doesn’t it. At least when I read the original article I got the impression that she was mostly concerned that Argos may operate a voice screening security check on people calling them, to decide the customer’s gender based on stereotypes about male and female voices. She went on to say that as a result of being repeatedly misgendered by their staff, she then had her account blocked, which I’m sure people can understand would be more than a bit annoying. So the issue is not simply that the staff misgendered her, but that they didn’t listen to her when she corrected them and then placed security restrictions on her account because of their own assumptions about her gender based on the tone of her voice. I just feel that this is a training issue myself, it’s probably unhelpful to use stereotypes like these which may cause some people problems accessing their accounts. Then again, I can see Argos’ perspective too, nobody wants their personal details or payment accounts getting into the wrong hands, and security is still important. So I guess my point it that it’s more than just being misgendered. That’s my 2 cents worth 🙂

Hi, I posted the above comment about Sophia’s problems with Argos, but something must have gone wrong because it’s posted to the wrong article. There’s no delete feature on the forum though, so if you’re wondering I wanted to delete it, but can’t. Whoops 🙂 Oh the joys of the Internet